In August 2008 Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in August 2009 for 21 nights. He won the bet!
In part 1 and 2 of this blog I shared some of the scientific research that shows how we affect other people’s emotional state and behaviour. Now I want to share how you can control your emotional state and your business outcomes.
A study by Drs Yu and Ranganathan from the Lerner Institute in 2004 confirmed a long held belief that mental rehearsal or visualisation can affect performance.
They created two groups:
Group 1 tensed the muscles of their little finger 15 minutes a day for 12 weeks.
Group 2 visualised tensing the same muscle for the same period of time instead.
After 12 weeks, group 1 had increased their strength by 53%, but group 2 had increased their strength by 35%, which is pretty impressive considering they were only pretending to do an exercise!
Now let’s just be clear, in order to influence your staff, or sell to your customers you can’t just visualise them, you do actually have to go and see them!
However, when it comes to success, visualisation only takes us part of the way. When I was preparing for my Edinburgh show I realised very quickly that visualising an audience laughing at my jokes was not enough.
Psychologists Vasquez and Buehler in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33 (2007) reviewed all the published research on the power of mental imagery and showed that people were more successful when they visualised not only the result they wanted but also the precise steps they would have to take to get there.
Scientists have even studied the neurochemistry of success. When we are engaged in an activity our brains are bathed in catecholamines. When we fear failure cortisol comes into play as part of the stress response. In a laboratory environment involving mathematics challenges, Lundberg and colleagues showed that increased levels of cortisol negatively affected performance. Those individuals who expected to be successful were successful twice as often as those who feared failure.
Dr Alice Isen, a psychologist at Cornell University, has conducted years of experiments in this area. Her research indicates that being optimistic before an event can even affect your negotiating skills. In a study she carried out in 1986, her results showed that negotiators who spent just 5 minutes looking at funny cartoons before going into negotiations were much more effective than those who didn’t get themselves into a similar positive state.
When I faced my Edinburgh challenge I regularly visualised success whilst at the same time looked at ways to overcome the various hurdles that other comics told me I would face. Before I went on stage I often read a funny article or watched a funny video on You Tube. Did it help? I don’t know, but it certainly helped relax me, which can only be a good thing…
Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.
